Graven Images is a cross-disciplinary design company, specialising in interior design, exhibition design and branding & communications.

I have been working at Graven Images for eight years, and am a great believer in their discipline-agnostic approach. We work across boundaries and around the world in small, focussed teams made up of graphic designers, interior designers, architects, engineers, 3D modellers and artists. Our recent projects have included the BBC Scotland headquarters, Five star boutique (and chain) hotels across three continents, major international banks and place branding for whole regions of the UK.

At Graven Images I have learned to run teams of designers as smoothly as working within a team myself, to treat every project with an academic level of rigour and to manage resources across hundreds of spinning plates at any one time.

I work at Graven Images in Glasgow. We are a cross-disciplinary design studio, but at the moment our work is weighted quite heavily towards interior design.

As a graphic designer, I get to work on a lot of three-dimensional objects, decorations, and embellishments. My job is often to ensure that the two-dimensional visual identity of a brand is translated effectively into a three-dimensional environment.

It’s fun, and it’s an aspect of graphic design that most companies do not get the opportunity to play with.

I have always kept a little bit of freelance design work going alongside my day jobs. It’s hard not to really; just as doctors get asked about minor maladies at dinner parties, designers get asked to design things for small businesses over a pint in the local pub.

My clients over the years have included Chapter, an internationally respected visual arts centre in Cardiff, a succession of fleetingly popular local bands, and The Independent Porsche Enthusiasts Club, for whom I edit and design a bi-monthly magazine.

Iso Design are motion graphics designers, specialising in typography for the screen.

Or at least they were in 1999 when I was their first employee, working half of each week on a freelance basis. Now Iso Design are multimedia interactivity gurus with a worldwide reach, responsible for the UI of BBC’s iPlayer, amongst other things.

I learned a lot from Iso Design about running an agile, lightweight studio and contracting specialists as and when needed to form ad-hoc creative teams. That’s because I was left taking care of the studio, the clients and everything else while the two principals were out on shoots, in meetings, or otherwise engaged. Iso Design was where I learned the importance of filing, between storyboarding and designing for the BBC, Channel 4, Wark Clements and a host of independent film organisations.

For the summer of 1998, I interned at Plazm Media Co-operative in Portland, Oregon.

Plazm worked through three areas: A self-published magazine, a type foundry and design company specialising in cutting-edge typography.

As a young graphic designer in the middle of my UK degree, it was mindblowing to get to work on projects for clients like Nike, Lucasfilm, MTV and Weiden & Kennedy.

Product magazine was one of the two recipients of Scottish Arts Council funding for literature in 1999 (the other was Canongate Books). Launched as a glossy broadside against popular culture, Product wore its heart on its sleeve and a sneer on its covers.

I was one half of a two-person design and art direction team, alongside Jenni Dogget. We worked hideously long hours and had a huge amount of fun, until the funding went south and the magazine swiftly followed.

Pointsize Associates was one of Scotland’s top ten design companies for, well, about ten years. I worked for them during the last few of those.

It was a tight-knit team, with a real ‘us against the world’ attitude. Our work was good, solid, corporate identity and communications stuff, with the occasional foray into retail and packaging.

Clients included Scottish Enterprise, Klick Photopoint, East Renfrewshire Council, the DFID, The British Council, the obligatory whisky distillery and, strangely, a scary fundamentalist Christian book publisher from the Deep South of America.